All right, everybody.
Next guest is Nat Hentoff.
He is an American historian, novelist, jazz and country music critic and syndicated columnist, formerly spent years at the Village Voice, is now part of the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C.
Welcome back to the show, Nat.
How are you doing?
Well, I was thinking, I listen to NPR regularly, and I'm a reporter, and if I were on the staff, it occurs to me I'd be fired.
Because, like Juan Williams, because I'm a reporter, I deal factually, I give my sources, then I do the news analysis like anybody that reports something, and then the analysis is personal.
That's all that Juan did.
What I'm saying is I'm stunned at what they did, and it's a self-imposed wound by the brass there that's going to take a long time to wear off.
Well, you know, this is something that's been happening a lot lately in media, is that people just say things beyond the pale.
Blasphemy at the Church of State is what Lou Rockwell describes it as, and this has happened to the woman who praised the most progressive, I guess you could call him, imam in all of Lebanon when he died and said that he'll be missed.
And it happened, of course, to Helen Thomas when she said that the settlers in the West Bank should come back to Brooklyn where they're from.
That was really something.
After all the years she's been in, you know, I knew her somewhat, I interviewed her, I didn't always agree with her, but what a way to have your career ended by saying something.
See, we are now, it's really close to, it's been happening, of course, ever since the Alien Sedition Acts of 1798, when, as you probably remember, John Adams pushed through this bill, and if you said anything that might put Congress or the President in contempt or make them look bad, you could be put in prison.
And sure enough, some newspaper people were, one congressman was, and that's how Thomas Jefferson got elected.
He fought that, and we've had that all along, but now, with all the need to speak up, no matter where you're coming from, we are in a kind of First Amendment, you know, it's not always state action, but I'll tell you, I was in Justice Brennan's chambers once, I was running a profile of him for the New Yorker.
And I asked him a schoolboy's question, what's the most important thing to you in the Bill of Rights?
And he looked at me as if I lost my marbles.
He said, it has to be freedom of speech.
That's where all our other liberties come from.
NPR doesn't recognize that, even NPR.
Right.
And by the way, and after all, NPR is state radio.
It's not just a private business.
And these days, when virtually all private property use is governed by the state in such a way as to make, you know, even a business that wants to just run and be independent has to be corrupt and involved in the state process in such a major way that we have this kind of unofficial but basic, you know, in effect, state radio.
State censorship, when we're talking about, you know, like Rick Sanchez being fired from CNN and what happened to Helen Thomas and Juan Williams.
This is all sort of a pseudo state censorship, at least.
Now, isn't it?
And there's something worse than that.
Under Obamacare, which is now the law, the state will, even now, before there's the public option, you supposedly can keep your insurance.
He said, well, you can't because the premiums are going up and all that.
But what's most important is that if you read this bill, which is quite a chore, there are so many different commissions that will regulate unless you're so wealthy, you can go to some other country to get cured or try to get cured.
But for most of us, this is a very dangerous bill because it fundamentally alters the relationship between doctor and patient.
And I thought anything in American history, you know, all kinds of terrible things have happened.
Woodrow Wilson canceled the First Amendment in the First World War.
There was Joe McCarthy.
This is the first time an administration is endangering people's lives and will cause some prematurely to die.
Well, you know, Nat, I actually just and people might think that's hyperbolic, but they should know that if they don't know, they can read all about you, that you're no right wing extremist, you know, with with some Tea Party conspiracy theory about this Obamacare thing.
This is a very real danger.
And, you know, I know someone who grew up in the Soviet Union and in the Soviet Union, everything was the state.
And so that meant even if you had a problem with your first grade teacher, your parents could not go and say, hey, look, you know, what's the problem in class?
Let's work this out, because ultimately that first grade teacher is tied with the Kremlin, is tied with the NKVD, will come down on you like 10 tons of bricks.
And they were in charge of your health care, too.
And that's why if you were a political dissident in the Soviet Union, you mostly ended up in the psychiatric ward.
Well, you remember when Elian Gonzalez was taken by his father back to Cuba, I checked on the school he was in and it was like all the schools there.
The teachers had two sets of records.
One was how the kid was doing and, you know, various subjects.
The other was, was there any indication from that child or older child that at home he was getting some kind of information or inculcation that questioned the legitimacy of the Castro government?
So that's where you had a public school that went a little deeper than teaching math and reading.
Well, and any doctor could tell you probably, well, you know, any interesting one to talk to could tell you that he and his buddies could set up a doctor care delivery business that would be perfectly profitable and perfectly affordable if only they were free to do so.
The whole industry already is, for decades, has been regulated from top to bottom by the U.S. Congress.
That's who invented the HMOs and the PPOs and the insurance system the way it is, is the insurance companies and the hospital companies and the drug companies, by way of the Congress, they've made their system the law instead of making it subject to the demands of consumers.
That's right.
And every time I, and I'm 85 and a half now, so I do see some doctors and once in a while they're so rushed filling out forms, getting permission to do what they figure they should do.
I'm lucky if I get five or six minutes with some of them.
Right.
There you go.
And so and and we can all just see the basic you don't have to be an ideological libertarian like me to see that the basic incentive structure in the health care industry in this country now is they make more money off of you if you die than if they actually have to provide any real health care for you.
They'd rather find every excuse in the world to not treat you.
And that's not the way market incentives operate.
That's what happens when the government is the one responsible for the bill and for the direction of the care in the first place.
Well, you're speaking also to a libertarian.
That's why I feel comfortable with the Cato Institute.
Well, there you go.
Now, let's talk about this article, which is the real reason that I brought you on here.
Outrage upon outrage is Mr. Hentoff.
It's very hard to nail down which are the most important for covering on any given day.
But you have this most important article at the Trentonian dot com.
That's a newspaper there in Trenton, New Jersey.
And the title is to prison anyway, despite acquittal.
Now, how could that be?
Well, that had to do with a very important decision by a federal district judge in New York.
As your listeners well know, there's been a continuing argument.
What do you do with people who are alleged to be and may be, but there's no due process because they've been held at Guantanamo.
Those military commissions have as much to do with the Constitution as, let's say, Zimbabwe.
So what do you do with them?
And the argument is you can't put them on a federal court.
Well, where else are you going to put them?
So this this prisoner, I don't like to use euphemisms like detainees, came before a federal district judge.
And his name is Lewis Kaplan.
He said, now, look here, I'm paraphrasing.
The Constitution is the rock on which we stand.
At least the government brought you into one of our regular constitutional courts.
But one of their key witnesses is somebody they found out about from you when they tortured you in a CIA secret cell.
So I'm not going to allow that witness to testify.
It's what they call in the law circles the fruit of the poison tree.
And so this judge has been getting a lot of flack.
And the interesting thing, and I don't know that many people know this, I quoted Glenn Greenwald, who's a very perceptive, incisive commentator, usually on Salon.com, but other places.
And he pointed out, and I've written about this too, under Bush and Cheney and Obama, there's not much difference between the three of them assaulting the Constitution, there is what this administration calls the post-acquittal detention power.
In other words, suppose this guy in the federal court or in a military commission, suppose he gets acquitted.
Doesn't matter.
Under what Obama believes and institutes, he is still an enemy combatant.
The Obama administration changed the language, but that's what it means.
It means you have no rights, even if you're acquitted, if the administration believes you're a danger, you're a terrorist, even though you were acquitted.
So that's why, for example, Obama has been trying to buy a prison in Illinois, as I remember, and remake it into one of those super-max prisons, where you cannot get out of your cell except for one hour a day, and you're under guard then, and nobody is allowed to speak to you or to come to you.
And the idea is, though, people who they can't really deal with, because whatever evidence they have came out of torture, so we'll put them in one of these super-maxes.
And this is an administration possibility that they want to do it.
I think that's a little apart from what we like to call the rule of law, which is based on due process.
All right, so what we have here is a case where this guy, Ghulani, is accused of participating in the African embassy bombings of 1998, which, if people remember the history of that, it was before September 11th, when the FBI still had the predominant role, and what they did was they convened a grand jury, and they indicted these people, and I believe including Osama bin Laden.
By the way, I want to make a quick interruption.
The FBI, in the field, when they were with prisoners, both in Guantanamo and Iraq, etc., they objected to torture.
And I have some of the messages they sent to this guy who's still head of the FBI and doesn't care about these things, and they have pointed out that their people know how to interrogate without torture.
Right, of course, and that's the story that Ali Soufan tells in The Dark Side by Jane Mayer.
That's right.
The FBI had everything under control in dealing with Abu Zubaydah, for example, and then the CIA came in and tortured him.
And the less he knew, the more they tortured him.
And the other thing is, this is something that Ben Wisner and some of the guys at the ACLU keep saying, not one person who has been proved, sometimes by evidence that the ACLU has gotten from the Department of Defense obituaries, not one person deeply engaged in torture in the field or getting their orders from on high, not one person has even been indicted.
And none of these civilians who authorize it.
Look at John Yoo.
He's still teaching law.
I don't know what kind of law, but he couldn't even be rebuked.
They wanted to, part of the Justice Department, but a senior official said, no, no, we're just going to call what he did with the torture memos back in 2002, we're going to call those errors in judgment.
Yeah, there you go.
Well, you know, it's funny.
I sometimes forget for months at a time that there's a US attorney, a prosecutor named John Durham, who had a case… Oh, he's supposed to be looking into this, isn't he?
Yes.
Well, he started off, he had the case of who destroyed the torture tapes.
And then his writ was expanded by Eric Holder, the attorney general, to include looking into violations of the law carried out by CIA torturers or contractor torturers that went beyond the tortures allowed in the memo.
And that's pretty bad because the memo says, hey, look, if you kill them, you're doing it wrong.
And in fact, it also says, and this is highlighted in Attention Deficit Democracy by James Bovard, it also said that if you kill them, we know that you were trying, you didn't do it on purpose, and that you were trying to prevent a greater harm, i.e. another terrorist attack against the United States.
So those things were built right into the memos anyway.
But then, so Durham's investigation was expanded to supposedly see if they could find where they had gone even beyond that.
And then it was in the Washington Post, although I don't know if there was anything official about it, that they had narrowed the scope, that Durham himself had narrowed the scope of this preliminary investigation to see whether there ought to be an investigation.
To a few different examples, even though we know there are more than 100, but a few different examples where men in CIA custody were tortured actually all the way to death.
And they were going to see whether those rose to the illegality of possibly having an investigation.
And I guess like a good grand jury in panel, we haven't heard much about it, but it seems like we should have at least this whole time, Nat, been hearing people wanting to know about it, but it seems like it's completely off the radar.
Now, accountability for Bush-era tortures, how's Obama going to do that when he's still torturing people at secret bases in Afghanistan right now as we speak?
Oh yeah, as we speak, there at the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, where we have a number of prisoners, there is what they call in the torture trade, the other prison, also at Bagram.
And that, according to the few people who somehow managed to get out, that's like the old-fashioned CIA black sites.
They're doing torture.
And nobody seems to care.
Yeah, well, you know, Larissa Alexandrovna at Raw Story showed that the torture prison in Poland was actually, used to be a Soviet base, and before that was a Nazi base.
And then the Americans used it as a safe house to torture people there.
Now, isn't it interesting, in a kind of sad sense, so many vital issues are involved in the midterms coming up next week.
I have not heard anybody on any side mention torture.
It's as if, it's now, they've conditioned the large majority of Americans.
It's just, it happens.
So you figure, okay, okay, let's get on to something more important.
It is important.
Let's get on to jobs.
Let's get on to Obamacare.
Meanwhile, we keep torturing people.
Right, yeah, it's outrage overload.
There's too many things to be mad about.
Hey, we still never got to prosecute Douglas Feith for manufacturing the case that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were friends.
That's right.
I mean, you want to talk about grievances.
Let's go back to Bill Clinton's mass murder of Iraqis through the blockade, his cover-up of the truth of who else was in on the Oklahoma bombing, his use of the Delta Force against the Branch Davidians at Waco in 1993.
There's some trials.
And then, well, geez, you're 85.
I guess you probably have some going back a ways, huh?
Also, Bill Clinton, and this was the kicker, he knew about Rwanda because we had a guy there who cared about it.
And information was coming as the forces that were going to do the genocide were preparing themselves.
And he gave instructions to the State Department to not mention anything that had the word genocide in it.
And it all went along.
And even Mary Albright, who was our UN representative, delayed any kind of UN action on it.
And then it happened.
And then, this is the chutzpah of all time.
After the rivers literally were running with blood, Clinton arrives in the capital city of Rwanda and says how terrible he feels that this went on.
If he and other leaders had only known about it, it wouldn't have.
And his case in Iraq, and the same thing with Barack Obama still torturing people.
I'm looking at the other Scott Horton's blog, the heroic anti-torture human rights attorney writes for Harper's Magazine there.
Yeah, right.
And he's been talking about how the Army Field Manual, Appendix M, still allows all kinds of sleep deprivation and cold water.
You know, I used to think, oh, well, if we only have the Army Field Manual not only for the Army, but for all these, for example, these special forces, they do a lot of very evil things.
Yeah, well, and they rewrote the Field Manual when John McCain...
But then I saw the new so-called revised Field Manual.
I would hate to be in a prison where that was okay.
Yeah, well, and that's what's happening to these people, as you say.
There's the Bagram prison, and then there's the wink-wink Bagram prison, the real one.
Yeah.
Room 101, your greatest fear.
So I wonder, you know, there's so much that is known that doesn't have to be even broken as a story, but it goes on and on and on, and people get distracted by other things.
And no wonder the president, this president, says he doesn't want to look backwards, he wants to look forward.
And, of course, that's the best way to avoid being punished for whatever crimes against, well, war crimes.
That's what they are in our own laws and our international covenant.
This goes on and on and on, and it is not an issue in this campaign.
Yeah, well, you know, I think that, I like to believe at least now that more and more people get it, and part of what they get is that politics isn't the answer anyway.
It's a withdrawal of consent, a withdrawal of the assumption of legitimacy for this government in general, that the American people have got to get through their head.
That's what we're bringing into this, is when no one cares to choose between a Republican or a Democrat anymore.
They just refuse to go along anymore.
Well, that's why, for example, the Tea Partiers, they did a good service.
They got a lot of people aware of what was going on with Obamacare in terms of people's actual lives.
But I've been writing about, I wish they had, I know that, you know, somebody said recently, and it's true, somebody, a Tea Party guy said, We're not organized, we're just decentralized.
But you still have a forum, and a lot of people listen to you.
They're not so hip to civil liberties either, that's not one of their main things.
They read the Constitution, but where do they talk about the separation of powers, not only on healthcare, but on torture?
Right.
Well, and that's the whole thing though, too.
And you know, I guess it's funny, I'm an anarchist now, and I have been for a while, but when I was a kid, I was mostly a constitutionalist.
And mostly because I thought, you know, yeah, but what are you going to do?
It's not perfect, but at least the people of the country think that they believe in the Constitution.
They know, I remember a poll years and years ago, to me anyway, that said 91% of the American people believe that the Constitution is important to them.
And particularly the Bill of Rights is important to them.
And that doesn't mean that they necessarily understand it, or that they choose right based on those principles.
But I always thought, Nat, that we could just say, hey, look, you know, piccolos and drums, and the Declaration of Independence, and the Fourth of July, and these are the things that we believe in, basically.
Everybody can believe in whatever religion they want.
They can go where they want.
They can own their own business, their own property.
They have the right to not be searched unless a judge says it's okay first, based on a real sworn statement that is punishable if it's a lie.
That you get a fair trial, even if they accuse you of the very worst crime.
These are the things that we all believe, right?
That's the problem.
You know, one of my main crusades for years has been so that kids coming up can understand why there are Americans.
And very, very few schools teach anything about the Constitution.
You know, when I used to go around to schools around the country, I would simply tell them stories.
You know why we have a Fourth Amendment?
You know what the British did to the colonists when they wrote their own warrants and came into their homes and offices?
Well, that's why we got the Fourth Amendment.
Do you know what's in it?
You get blank stares.
You get blank stares now.
And we don't have it anymore, so to speak.
But you know what?
At the same time, there really is a lot of reason to be optimistic.
Because even though people are bent out of shape sometimes about the wrong things and pointing their fingers the wrong way, at least they're mad.
And I think that more and more people are understanding that empire abroad means the end of the republic at home.
That we just can't have it both ways.
And that if we want to have our Constitution, that doesn't just mean separation of church and state.
It also means gun rights, too.
And the gun rights people got to understand.
It means separation of church and state, too.
That all of us have got to get together on just the few basic things.
Like peace and passing on the Bill of Rights to the young ones.
Right?
These are the most important things.
I tell you, I wish you were running for Congress.
No, no, no, that would be the worst thing.
No, that would be absolutely horrible.
I'd never do that, I promise.
No, but we need people in there who can do some of this.
You know, I was a big fan of the Civil Liberties with Russ Feingold.
But here he comes and says, oh, we've got to have this Obamacare.
He may get beaten, finally.
That means whoever takes his place is not going to be as passionate as he was about the Constitution.
Yeah.
You can't give up.
That's why the two of us do what we do.
But it sometimes looks pretty dreary.
Yeah.
Well, you know, the first time I ever met Ron Paul was in 2004.
And Karen Katowski, who I'm sure you're aware of, she was the one who witnessed the neocons lying us into war from the Pentagon back in 2002 and 2003.
And I asked her, well, what would you ask Ron Paul?
We were all at the Libertarian Party Convention.
And she said, well, I would ask him, what are we even doing here when there's only one Ron Paul?
You know, Russ Feingold ain't it.
There's really only one Ron.
And what are we supposed to do when there's only one?
Why even bother kind of thing?
And so I did ask him that.
And his answer to me was that, hey, a few years ago, we assumed that the Soviet Union would last at least, you know, generations into the future.
And then the whole world changed.
And so our job is not to predict the future and predict the worst, but to just keep teaching about liberty and we'll see what happens.
We're witnesses to it like everybody else.
And then, of course, we've seen what happened in practice with him following that exact same strategy.
Just keep teaching people about liberty and see how it goes.
And, you know, when he started last time in 2007, a lot of people had never heard of him before.
Hardcore libertarians all across the country knew all about him.
We were his cult following, I guess, in a way.
But by the end of the thing, he was famous enough for that's where he should have started.
And it could have been a different story maybe.
And it seems to me that, you know, he would be the oldest president to take office in American history.
And, you know, obviously the military industrial complex and the bankers and the TV people aren't going to want it.
But it seems to me like here's this honest man, no matter what you agree with or not about all of his policies, he's an honest guy and he's basically saying, all right, one last chance.
Peace and liberty and the Bill of Rights and the Constitution on a silver platter.
You can have a republic or an empire.
Here it is.
Are you going to take it or not?
And I think that the people on the left and the people on the right and the people who don't identify with either of those things or never did that really agree with that, that peace and the Bill of Rights are what matters, I think maybe we could have one last chance and actually take it.
I think what I'm seeing is that more and more people, they're not huge in numbers yet, they may not call themselves libertarians, they may not even know what that means, but they're coming to that kind of understanding that to be an American citizen and to have that mean anything, you have to have an understanding of freedom all the way through as the individual gets his freedom or her freedom.
And it's not a grant from the government.
They work for us.
Yeah, and you know, the real bottom line is, and one time I got in a fight in the email with a fan of the show, years and years ago, where he was trying to get me to come up with the word.
For some reason he was just beating me over the head because I didn't understand what he was getting at, but I'm glad he made such a big deal about it because it's really easy.
It's right in front of us.
It's accountability.
That's what we want is for the law to apply to everybody equally.
If it has to apply to us, it ought to at least apply to them a little bit or something.
And we see wars based on lies undeclared by our Congress.
We see the Bill of Rights shredded.
We see trillions of dollars created out of thin air by these central bankers and given to their friends who are already the most rich and powerful people in the world.
The biggest heist ever going on.
And what we want now is accountability for these people.
That's how we can keep our liberty is really kind of what you were talking about more specifically a few minutes ago, which is prosecutions for torturers, for example.
No, there is a law and torturers will go to prison for torturing people.
That's how it's supposed to be.
Well, we have to keep on keeping on.
We're going to try.
Well, listen, I really appreciate all your work along these lines and all your wisdom from your point of view.
You're always a great contribution to this show.
And it's also like an Obamacare, it's in self-defense.
As somebody my age, I can't vote for anybody who's for Obamacare.
Well, yeah, clearly understood.
And people, I urge you, especially if you tend to be liberal or democratic and oppose the wars and don't usually see things my way on economic issues and that kind of thing, you should, if you're not too familiar, you should become familiar with Nat Hentoff and his background and who he is because I wouldn't want you to kind of characterize him in a way where, like, Matto would have you believe about somebody who's against Obamacare, that it's all based on some kind of, you know, ridiculous Obama's a Muslim kind of Palin-esque nonsense because that's certainly not where Mr. Hentoff is coming from.
So I just want to try to set that context clear.
I wouldn't care if Obama was an atheist like I am, a pro-life atheist.
That would be okay, but not if he puts in Obamacare.
All right.
Well, that's a good place to leave it, is to highlight the importance of that issue.
So thank you for your work on all these issues and thanks for your time on the show today, Nat.
Well, thank you for continuing the fight.
Everybody, that's Nat Hentoff.
He's at the Cato Institute and he's got this piece.
Oh, my Mozilla froze up, but it's, to prison anyway, after acquittal, at the Trentonian.
I believe it's theTrentonian.org.
